How to Determine Digital Signage ROI

Our cus­tomers increas­ing­ly use dig­i­tal sig­nage when shop­ping in stores. This boom isn’t new, but it is linked to a glob­al strat­e­gy to put an empha­sis on dig­i­tal. Ulti­mate­ly, the goal of dig­i­tal sig­nage is to pro­vide con­tent and offers in phys­i­cal spaces that are as com­plete and inter­ac­tive as those on the Internet.

Today, cus­tomers need to be able to man­age their inter­ac­tive screens sim­ply, as eas­i­ly as their app or web­site. That’s why Adobe cre­at­ed its screens mod­ule in Adobe Expe­ri­ence Man­ag­er. The mod­ule can han­dle screen loca­tions, chan­nels, and spe­cif­ic dis­plays from a uni­fied plat­form to pro­vide seam­less expe­ri­ences to cus­tomers on any screen. Most impor­tant­ly, it allows mar­keters to final­ly uni­fy their dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tion strate­gies with their point-of-sale com­mu­ni­ca­tion strategies.

Nev­er­the­less, as with any tech­nol­o­gy, it is nec­es­sary to define mea­sur­able objec­tives from the out­set to be able to mea­sure its ROI. With­out this data, it is impos­si­ble to deter­mine whether the exper­i­ment was a suc­cess or not!

Mul­ti­ple ben­e­fits for dig­i­tal signage

As an inno­v­a­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tions chan­nel, dig­i­tal sig­nage allows brands to get clos­er to their audi­ences, inte­grat­ing all the pos­si­bil­i­ties offered by new tech­nolo­gies (flex­i­bil­i­ty, cus­tomi­sa­tion, adap­ta­tion, track­ing, and so on).

One report shows that dig­i­tal sig­nage gets up to 10 times more atten­tion than a tra­di­tion­al paper dis­play (Intel Ontario, 2012).

Dig­i­tal signage’s impact on con­sumer mem­o­ry is also stun­ning. Shop­ping mall vis­i­tors who see a screen adver­tise­ment for one of the mall stores are 1.56 times more like­ly to remem­ber it and 1.4 times more like­ly to buy in that store (Arbirtron Study 2014).

Two busi­ness mod­els for dig­i­tal signage

There­fore, the first pri­or­i­ty is to define your objec­tives for your dig­i­tal sig­nage by exam­in­ing what an inter­ac­tive screen can or should replace, and how it can boost com­mer­cial performance.

These objec­tives are not always finan­cial: too often, these projects are con­sid­ered only in terms of the cost of imple­men­ta­tion ver­sus the addi­tion­al sales gen­er­at­ed. There are actu­al­ly two pos­si­ble busi­ness models.

In the ROI-based clas­sic adver­tis­ing mod­el, the device serves an adver­tis­ing space leased to oth­er brands. For exam­ple, one can imag­ine the dif­fu­sion of adver­tise­ments for high-end hotels with­in a high-end car dealership.

In the mar­ket­ing mod­el based on the ROO (return on objec­tives), no direct income is gen­er­at­ed, but the objec­tives can be diverse and varied:

• Brand­ing: to increase brand aware­ness, improve the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, and boost engage­ment with the brand’s audience.
• Enter­tain­ment: to dis­tract and retain peo­ple with­in a space.
• Infor­ma­tion: to share infor­ma­tion in real time, and to help and guide peo­ple (for exam­ple, with­in a hotel).
• Pro­duc­tiv­i­ty: to save time and mon­ey. A car deal­er­ship, for exam­ple, can choose to present only cer­tain mod­els or to high­light acces­sories, thus reduc­ing its stor­age costs.

It is there­fore around these two mod­els that the expect­ed per­for­mance must be con­struct­ed if brands are to cal­cu­late whether the expect­ed cost responds well. Obvi­ous­ly, many brands try to mix these approach­es. For exam­ple, I use screens to talk about my prod­ucts, pro­vide infor­ma­tion, do brand­ing, and at times sell adver­tis­ing space, by valu­ing traf­fic in front of these screens.

We there­fore need to be able to build prof­itabil­i­ty mod­els around the vol­ume of traf­fic as much as around the ini­tial objec­tives: with­out these objec­tives, it is impos­si­ble to mea­sure suc­cess. If we do not mea­sure any­thing, it will inevitably be a fail­ure: non-fixed results are nev­er reached.

How do you eval­u­ate the per­for­mance of your dig­i­tal sig­nage cam­paigns? Feel free to share your expe­ri­ences in the comments!